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> it wouldn't be too far of a leap if my instance was just blocked by mastodon.social and others entirely, especially when it's commonly confused as a single-user instance (which usually get silently/hidden blocked without notice instead).

Is this actually common practice? Seems kind of inimical to the idea of self-hosting.

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I've rarely seen instances get blocked on large Mastodon servers for no reason at all. I've seen plenty of small ActivityPub server projects struggle to federate with Mastodon, though. Unfortunately, very few AP servers are spec-compliant.

It does make sense to defederate single-user instances instead of individually banning their account, though, because you can simply reject messages rather than processing them and then applying moderation status to the underlying account.

I've been writing my own ActivityPub implementation, and mastodon.social is stricter with HTTP signatures in particular, possibly with other areas of the protocol as well. There were several instances where mastodon.social would reject messages that a test server accepted.

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